Now this is material that piques my interest more than anything: insights from one of the bigger names in the industry. Jean-Louis Gassee debunks the "Apple-must-license-its-software-or-die" myth by looking back upon the past - and if you don't know who JLG is, then please take that dunce hat and stand in the corner for three hours, contemplating your existence. Note: OSNews has a bug with using diacritic marks on the front page, so JLG's name is misspelled. It is correctly spelled in the article body.

The bottom line of every successful business is "PROFIT" and not market share.

Licensing will increase market share and competitors. When competitors increase, profit will decrease. The profits from licensing will not be able to recover the losses. You don't need a MBA to understand such a simple concept.

The problem with Apple at that point of time is that they not only want to be monopoly in hardware, they also want to be monopoly in OS and applications.
Therefore, they are not actively encouraging developers to create more applications for the Mac. This result in shortage of applications for Mac and further reduce market share. They also have behind the door deal with MS and this close off other brand of office applications to Mac.

PC plaforms have many development tools and many of them are free or very low cost. There are also miliions of books on software developement on the PC but there are hardly any title on Mac.

I use to own a Mac ( with Mac OS 8 ) and I have tried to become a Mac developer. But I can only find one book on Mac software development and it is Java development.

Apple's problem is lack of respect for software developers. However, they seem to realize their errors and have open up the apps market for iPhone. The number of apps is the reason why iPhone is successful. Without apps, iPhone is just a good looking phone.